Tech Lead Manager, Backend

<div class="content-intro"><p>Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.</p></div><p>The RO Performance team is at the heart of understanding and improving Waymo's self-driving technology. We build and maintain the critical infrastructure, to process and analyze vast amounts of data from both real-world driving logs and simulations.&nbsp;Our systems generate key metrics and power dashboards which are essential for tracking the product performance, identifying areas for improvement, and making data-driven decisions. The insights produced by our team directly influence Waymo's operational rollouts, weekly performance reviews, and ultimately, the safety and reliability of our autonomous vehicles.</p> <p>In this hybrid role, you will report to an Staff Software Engineer.</p> <p><strong>You will:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Technical Leadership &amp; Strategy: Define the roadmap for high-performance, low-latency pipelines that bridge massive-scale simulation with real-world monitoring.</li> <li>Team Management &amp; Mentorship: Grow and develop a team of engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, code health, and continuous learning.</li> <li>Evaluation &amp; Fidelity Oversight: Drive the scientific rigor behind our "virtual driver's test," ensuring simulation signals are highly predictive of real-world behavior.</li> <li>ML &amp; Innovation: Lead the integration of advanced ML models to identify high-value driving scenarios, optimizing testing efficiency through large-scale model deployment.</li> <li>Operational Excellence: Ensure the long-term stability and health of production systems while championing developer experience and best-in-class software practices.</li> <li>Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Data Science and Systems Engineering leads to translate complex vehicle telemetry into high-level strategic insights.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>You have:</strong></p> <ul> <li>5+ years of full-time software engineering experience (or a quantitative PhD with 2+ years of professional SWE experience).</li> <li>Experience managing small teams</li> <li>Advanced command of C++ (or another OOP language) with functional familiarity in Python and SQL.</li> <li>A deep interest in autonomous driving, simulation-based evaluation, and large-scale data systems.</li> <li>Excited about autonomous driving, Simulation + Eval</li> <li>Strong verbal and written communication skills</li> </ul> <p><strong>We prefer:</strong></p> <ul> <li>7+ years of industry experience (or 3+ years post-doc) in building a large scale production system with its long term stability and health in mind.</li> <li>B.Sc., M.Sc. or PhD in Computer Science</li> <li>Experience working with large FAANG scale distributed systems.</li> </ul>